https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote
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While I was working on my latest redesign, I added a statement explaining how “artificial intelligence” is used on my website. And in a fit of pique, I slapped this line onto the end: I am very upset I had to write any of this, but here we both are. Look, I don’t know if the exasperation coursing through that line is wise, as a working designer who would like to continue to, well, work. But I’ll own the sentiment. If nothing else, it lines up with how I feel about large language models (LLMs),…
It’s been, like, hot-hot for the last week, with Boston seized by the same heat wave affecting…well, everywhere else. Personally I’ve never cared for summer, even before it entered its villain era. And after a few days stuck inside avoiding the heat, the cabin fever had properly set in. So when I saw the temperature was in the high sixties 1 this morning, it felt like the best birthday present. Like some misaligned cog in the planet’s inner workings had suddenly snapped back into alignment, and…
Two weeks ago, I quietly pushed up a new look for this website. Some redesigns happen over a year or two; others happen over a few months. Neither one’s easy, mind you, but this one’s the latter. A month or so back, I told an old friend I was in the middle of redesigning this little site. She laughed and said, “Again?!” Which, you know, extremely and completely fair! The last design went up in March of last year, giving it a little more than 15 months in the sun. I loved it when it went up, and…
Let’s review. Token costs are rising. In response, Meta and Amazon have shut down their internal “artificial intelligence” leaderboards; Microsoft has pushed its employees toward Copilot, and away from Claude Code’s rising costs. Uber has already capped its usage of LLMs internally, setting a monthly cap for every employee’s token spending. All of this is happening against the backdrop of the biggest “AI” platforms still borrowing money against hypothetical future returns, and markets are…
I’m giving a talk at next week’s Boston WordPress meetup! If you’re around on Monday night — that’s 27 April 2026, for you Julian calendar sickos — I hope you’ll be able to join us. I’ll be giving a short talk on design systems: how they’ve changed the way digital teams work, and how we might need to rethink them. It’s a fun talk, and I’m excited to be there. I’ve been rehearsing the talk this week, and was struck by…well, how weird it felt to rehearse a talk. That’s when I realized that next…
We cannot separate the everyday use of “AI” platforms from their use in death and war.
